I started Blue Monkey in 2025 along with two colleagues, with the stated aim of helping local and regional companies to streamline their marketing strategies by reintroducing traditional principles of the advertising industry. I worked with marketing agencies when I was building my company in Bromsgrove over the last decade, and I despaired at the complete lack of focus on branding, as if branding is an issue secondary to pure algorithm marketing. The fact is, branding is the cover by which a book is ultimately judged. In a world of shockingly low attention spans, strong visuals count. It's also true that branding goes beyond a logo and into more subtle points that are equally forgotten in the marketing sphere, notably the way in which a brand positions your business and speaks to a specific subset of the population. These are vital issues when building a business, and my aim with Blue Monkey is to affect the local and regional landscape through brand enhancement and to build partnerships with companies seeking to elevate their marketing by controlling things that are well within their remit to do.
Backstory
Scale is not linear. It suffices to say that the common perception of scaling a business is that, put simply, to make x-percent more money you need a correlative increase in business infrastructure and resources. This is prohibitive and, as a matter of fact, untrue. You can increase revenue through various changes to your business that don't require more space, more manpower and more hardware. In the context of our exploits, the most obvious change is in market positioning; that may be by shifting your entire business towards the higher end of the market or, as can be seen in a lot of established companies, through creating parallel product or service lines aimed at different market segments. A great example of this on a large scale is Tesco's "Finest" range; a modest increase in outlay (better steak, more natural vegetables) enables a disproportionate increase in income. My favourite local example is of a narrowboat hire company that replenished the decor in part of its fleet, then rebranded these boats as "Signature". The upfront costs to the company was relatively minor, while they consistently charge 40% more to hire a boat from the Signature fleet compared to the basic fleet - which was their only fleet 5 years ago.